CoL49 (1) The Automobile Graveyard

[Robert Mahnke]

This is neat stuff, Robin.  I'm curious: Is there a textual basis to suggest
that "The Automobile Graveyard" was a source or inspiration, rather than the
something more like coincidence or convergent evolution?

On 5/5/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> This is spoiler city, as if anybody cares.
>
> A major theme in CoL49 is theater of cruelty. Mucho's nightmare of a used
> car lot illuminates a theme that will expand as the story progresses. A
> source/inspiration I have not seen cited elsewhere is Fernando Arrabal's
> "The Automobile Graveyard", a play first published  in French back in 1958
> and translated into English in 1960.
>
>        Not for the squeamish or easily offended, Arrabal's work has
>        Samuel Beckett beat when it comes to the depiction of pointless
>        cruelty. Set in a junkyard that operates like it's a hotel (complete
>        with an especially accommodating room service), "The
>        Automobile Graveyard" is to some extent a Christian allegory,
>        complete with betrayal, beatings and the crucifixion of a guitar-
>        strumming pacifist. But Arrabal often admitted that he could
>        never conceive of love without violence, and so the 80-minute
>        play is a veritable orgy of jumbled images from myth, ritual and
>        erotica. Tough and twisted, Arrabal makes Artaud's work feel
>        like the theater of gentility.
>        http://www.arrabal.org/new206.html
>
> Note that "Emanu" [the "Jesus" character in "Graveyard"] is a trumpet
> player, not some guitar strumming pacifist.
>
> See also: http://www.arrabal.org/new207.html
>
> Guernica and other plays by Fernando Arrabal:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/c7ozms
>
> This situates "The Automobile Graveyard" among other works from the theater
> of the absurd/theater of cruelty movements of the post-war era. [Arrabal,
> alnog withJorodowsky, was one of the founders of the "Panic" movement—
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_Movement —
>
> Later [about 1/3 of the way in, page 48 in the Perennial Classics edition
> (hereafter PC ed.) ], we have our first mention of "The Courier's Tragedy",
> an example of theater of cruelty from Jacobean times:
>
>        "You know, blokes," remarked one of the girls, a long-waisted,
>        brown-haired lovely in a black knit leotard and pointed
>        sneakers, "this all has a most bizarre resemblance to that ill, ill
>        Jacobean revenge play we went to last week."
>
> The girl's outfit and affect point to the left-bank beatnik look. In
> addition to setting time and place, it also points to a look associated with
> the French Beats.
>
> In time Oedipa comes around to the paranoid notion that Pierce Inverarity
> has created  false evidence of the Tristero as a cruel joke on her—is
> Inverarity's  real legacy is this act of cruelty upon Oed? "Though she feels
> like she's in a play, she is anyway."
>
> Portraying Mucho Maas as a used-car salesman manages to expand on themes
> laid out in "The Automobile Graveyard" This descriptive passage could be
> considered as set design for a mounting of "The Automobile Graveyard":
>
>        Yet at least he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how
>        could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro,
>        Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the
>        most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of
>        themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be
>        like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to
>        look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a
>        shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho
>        himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket
>        booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers,
>        or only of dust and when the cars were swept out you had to
>        look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way
>        of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he
>        supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and
>        kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost:
>        clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10 [cents], trading
>        stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts,
>        tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the
>        phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already
>        were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside
>        of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie,
>        a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just
>        for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of
>        despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust,
>        body wastes—it made him sick to look, but he had to look.
>        CoL 49, 4/5 PC ed.
>
> Pynchon rarely uses a concept just once. The idea of a "lot" crying first
> enters in this scene. Later, Mucho speaks of the nightmare of the used car
> lot's "N.A.D.A." — http://www.nada.com/ —sign flashing. At the end of the
> book the lot that will be cried will be an auction lot of stamps. Arrabal
> will appear in the form of anarchist Jesus Arrabal:
>
>        In an all-night Mexican greasy spoon off 24th, she found a
>        piece of her past, in the form of one Jesus Arrabal, who was
>        sitting in a corner under the TV set, idly stirring his bowl of
>        opaque soup with the foot of a chicken. "Hey," he greeted
>        Oedipa, "you were the lady in Mazatlan." He beckoned her to
>        sit.
>
>        "You remember everything," Oedipa said, "Jesus; even tourists.
>        How is your CIA?" Standing not for the agency you think, but for
>        a clandestine Mexican outfit known as the Conjuration de los
>        Insurgentes Anarquis-tas, traceable back to the time of the
>        Flores Magon brothers and later briefly allied with Zapata.
>        CoL49, 96 PC ed.
>
> . . . later we encounter exiles living in the waste the monied class leaves
> behind, in a passage that appears towards the end of the book:
>
>        She thought of other, immobilized freight cars, where the kids
>        sat on the floor planking and sang back, happy as fat, whatever
>        came over the mother's pocket radio; of other squatters who
>        stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards along
>        all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of
>        wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some
>        pole in a lineman's tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of
>        telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular
>        miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages
>        flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of
>        unheard messages.
>        CoL49, 149 PC ed.
>
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